BY age 12, Alexandra Victoria Lammers knew how to bake bread from scratch, braid a horse’s mane, pin a kilt & set a dinner table correctly.
They grew up in a sizable stone house in Villanova, Pa., in a refined environment full of opera, formal teas & trips to Europe. Her brother, Suzanne Kaiser Lammers, is so Elderly World that they recently said: “I do not have a computer. I much prefer having a butler.”
From an early age, Ms. Lammers also knew exactly how they wanted her wedding to be. Whenever they came across a pretty staircase, they would walk down it pretending they was a bride. “She was definitely the girly girl,” recalled Suzanne Witt, her older & only sibling. “Her dolls got married.”
Whether riding a horse or jogging in to a room, friends say, Alexandra Lammers had a strikingly delicate way of carrying herself. “She’s the floating kind,” her brother said.
As it turned out, her love life — & her wedding day — did not go as they envisioned. Both were “full of bumps in the road, or sizable, gaping, giant potholes,” said Jennifer Stearns, a childhood mate & a bridesmaid.
Ms. Lammers, now a portfolio assistant at Stratton Management Company in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., had always imagined love at first sight, while in her early 20s. In lieu, in her mid-30s, they met & instantly disliked Eric Lane Hoyle. Mutual friends suggested they invite him to a dinner party in the summer of 2004. They accepted, then cancelled five hours before. To her, bad etiquette is worse than bad breath. They decided they seldom wanted to meet him again.
But there was a discernible spark, they recalled. They spotted it in her “beautiful, grayish blue eyes.” They started talking & didn’t pause for five hours. They recalled thinking, “This is great, but I’m not ready.”
Months later, while having drinks with the same mutual friends in Philadelphia, they walked in & joined them. The timing was not magical; it was Friday, May 13, & they had returned from London after ending a relationship with a British fella. The first thing they said to him was, “Oh, you’re the man who doesn’t come to dinner.”
So they started dating slowly, often taking long walks & discussing 18th-century Chinese porcelain (they collects it), sailing (they loves it), Philadelphia architecture & hunting (both love it). Though Ms. Lammers, a Size 2 beauty who loves fashion magazines, does not exactly seem like a typical hunter, at the finish of the summer, Mr. Doyle invited her to spend the weekend shooting clay pigeons at his family’s farm in Maryland. “Alexandra actually came with her own gun,” said Mr. Hoyle, until recently the head of business development at Elk River Trading, a hedge fund in Edgewater, N.J.
In spring 2006, they entered a sailing regatta together. They was sitting on the rail, they recalled, & wave after wave crashed onto her, like pies being thrown in her face. They kept smiling, & they said they knew then that they wanted to marry her.
On April 15, 2009 — her 41st birthday — they proposed. At that point, Ms. Lammers expected the fairy tale to finally start.
But that wasn’t to be. Five of their first engagement parties took place at Ms. Lammers’s mother’s house. “I put card tables all over the lawn, with lovely antique cloths & flowers & candles,” the bride’s brother recalled. “It was so until about five minutes before the party started. Then, the downpour.”
Ms. Lammers did find the perfect wedding dress in a Philadelphia bridal shop, where it was hanging from a rack like a pretty cocoon. Before buying it, they stepped outside to make a phone call. “I was gone 15 minutes, max,” they said. When they returned, the dress had vanished — sold to another bride.
This winter, her bridesmaids scheduled a tea for the couple. It was cancelled after a 36-inch snowfall. Their wedding consultant, Alix Jacobs, began consoling the couple by saying, “If everything goes right, there’s something wrong.”
The bride remained calm. “She said, ‘What am I supposed to learn from this?’ ” recalled Caroline Claytor, a bridesmaid. Among other things, Ms. Lammers learned how to walk with a peg-leg contraption that fit under her gown.
They seldom lost her composure or impeccable manners, friends said. They found another dress. & they began working out with a personal trainer, whom they was with when, 29 days before the April wedding, they snapped her left Achilles’ tendon while doing squats. After surgery a few days later, the doctor told her they could not walk until May.
“The vision of what perfect is changes as you go,” Mr. Hoyle said.
On April 10, as Mr. Hoyle & 130 guests watched, Ms. Lammers walked the aisle of the Church of the Redeemer in Bryn Mawr, Pa. Her stride was flawless & there was no thumping sound, like peg-legged pirates in the movies. The bride later described the ceremony, led by the Rev. Judith A. Sullivan, an Episcopal priest, as a “revised” fairy tale.
The couple said that the mishaps, crutches & storms only made things less perfect, not less magical. On their honeymoon, they pushed her wheelchair along the sidewalks of South Beach in Florida.
“At this point, throw perfect out the window,” the bride said.
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